It would be a living suicide.
“If you say no,” Sang said, “I would not blame you. I don’t know that I could come here to your world and never be able to go home. But if you are willing to do this to have a chance to save the people of your world, then the time is now upon us when we must act.”
Richard steeled himself. He hooked his bow over one shoulder and his pack over the other. Vika hoisted her pack up over one shoulder.
Finally, Richard reached out with his left hand and put it firmly on Sang’s right shoulder. His skin was cool, soft, and moist, more like the skin of a salamander than that of a person. He looked over at Vika. When their eyes met, each of them placed a hand on the other’s shoulder; then she put her right hand on Sang’s left shoulder.
Sang reached up and laid a claw over each of their shoulders. Once he had, they were all locked together into a circle of three—an important component of the Law of Nines, Richard reminded himself. He hoped that added bit of magic would help him and Vika survive going into darkness.
“Do it,” Richard said. “Call your lifeline.”
52
Almost as soon as he said it, he thought of Kahlan and wished he could call his words back. But at the same time he knew he had to be strong if Kahlan and everyone else in his world were to have a chance to live free of the Glee. Besides, even as he had the thought, it was already too late.
Everything all around him—the stone bridge, the forest, the Wizard’s Keep above them and the city of Aydindril below—all started to look scribbly.
Only Vika and Sang seemed solid. The air itself had streaks of empty darkness slashing through it, as if the fabric of the world of life were shredded apart. The whole world around them was rapidly dissolving into scribbles as holes tore open into voids in the very reality of existence.
Those voids suddenly expanded explosively.
All light, all sound, and everything else that made up the world around him seemed to be sucked out of existence, ripped away, leaving a universe of nothingness. Not even Sang and Vika were there with him.
He was totally alone as he was sucked into that darkness.
It felt in a way like tripping in the darkest night and tumbling off a cliff.
Richard felt himself falling without end.
He kept expecting to hit the bottom, or to hit something. He knew he couldn’t fall this long without soon slamming into something. His muscles tensed and his nerves burned with the agonizing expectation of that sudden, bone-shattering impact.
It was terrifying. An eternity of fear was compressed into every second that he felt himself helplessly falling into darkness.
That fear of hitting the bottom—or of falling forever—became everything.
Richard worked at talking himself out of the panic that was clawing at his emotions. He tried to see his hand but couldn’t. He tried to touch it to his face, but he felt nothing, either from his hand or his face. He felt nothing at all.
He put all his effort into focusing on reasoning out what was happening. As he did, he realized that he wasn’t really falling. Once he concentrated and tried to make sense of what he was feeling, or rather not feeling, he became aware that there was no down, no up, no hot, no cold, no light, and actually no sensation of any kind. It was complete and total suspension of all sensation. There was nothing other than his own, free-floating thoughts.
He couldn’t feel anything that made him feel alive. He couldn’t feel his heartbeat or his breathing or anything that made him feel that he existed at all anymore. In fact, it felt as if he didn’t exist, as if he were merely thinking that he had once existed. It was even becoming hard to remember his world.
Rather than let himself be pulled under by the overwhelming emotion of feeling that he no longer existed, and since he had absolutely no control over what was happening, he let himself relax as he tried not to think.
He lost track of how long it had been, and as he did, it began to feel like something he was all too familiar with: the eternity of the underworld. That place, too, was darker than dark, and it, too, went on forever.
But this was a different kind of darkness. Not only was it a physical darkness, it was also a kind of inner darkness. The totality of it was different from the underworld. This was not a sense of being in the world of the dead, but a void of existence itself. The only thing that seemed to exist was his thoughts.
In the underworld there had at least been constellations of souls and he had been able to will his soul to travel through them. Here, there was nothing to travel through and he was not able to will himself to go anywhere. There was no “there” within this darkness.
Suddenly, it ended.
Existence imploded in on him from all sides.
He felt his own weight, and with that, solid ground under his feet.
He opened his eyes and as scribbles all around him were just vanishing, he saw a strange world of desolation beneath a heavily clouded sky. All the clouds were different shades of dark red, darker and thicker the lower they were. Ruddy rock rose up in towering, otherworldly formations, seemingly shaped by the hot, moist wind that swirled around them. The muddy-reddish clouds that rolled by low overhead looked almost like smoke.
Everything in this world was some shade of sullen red. Richard felt like he was looking out through a piece of red glass that tinted everything.
It made him wonder if his eyes or even his brain had somehow been damaged by the journey from his world and maybe they weren’t working properly, and as a result he could now see things only in shades of red.
He breathed in deeply. The air was damp and warm. So damp that in comparison to his own world it was heavy, humid, and uncomfortable. It felt almost thick. He could see why Sang said that his world was a dry world. This was an oppressively clammy, sticky, and moist world. He already longed for dryness.
They were standing in an area of sand that reminded him very much of the area of white sand in the Garden of Life in the People’s Palace. Although, the sand here looked white only in that it was less red than everything else.
With all the smooth, towering rock formations, it felt almost like an eerie cathedral of stone sculpted by wind and weather. That muggy wind moaned as it moved through the strange, smoothly curved surfaces of the rock.
Vika was still holding his shoulder on one side and Sang on the other. Their arms were all still locked together. It had seemed he was totally alone once he went into darkness, but that wasn’t true. The other two had always been there with him, he just hadn’t been aware of them.
He finally released Vika’s shoulder, and she his as they straightened. He could tell by the look on her face that she had experienced the same thing he had coming to this brooding, reddish, windswept world. He let his hand drop away from Sang.
He leaned toward Vika and whispered, “What colors do you see?”
She looked around. “Everything looks red. At least my outfit fits right in.”
Richard nodded. “That it does.”
As he looked around, he could see from the clouds between the reddish rock formations that they were someplace high. Over the edge, down below them, the ground was obscured by the rolling, roiling clouds drifting swiftly by the high place where they were.
“Come,” Sang said to them. “We must get away from this dry place before the others come.”
He turned and made his way between some of the surrounding rock formations. They were striated in layers of different colors of dark brownish reds and looked like the wind had eroded the soft rock, making smooth, round depressions and curving edges. It was disorienting to look at.
Richard could see by the clouds down lower that they were high up in some kind of desolate, mountainous terrain. There was absolutely no vegetation. He remembered Sang saying that it was a dry place. The wind carried a lot of moisture and made a ghostly moaning sound through the strangely shaped rock formations. Apparently, the air, as damp as it was, was not damp enough for the Glee.
T
rying to focus his eyes in this reddish world was giving him a headache. The sand he and Vika were on was the least red thing he could see.
“This is my home world,” Sang said as he waved an arm, urging them on, “the home world of the Glee. We have arrived safely. Now we need to get down out of this place.”
53
“Where is the device?” Richard asked, grabbing Sang by his arm before he could leave. “Is that it?”
Sang stopped and looked across the sand to what Richard was pointing at: something that definitely did not belong in this strange, windblown landscape of organic shapes.
There, across the way on the edge of the sand, stood a square piece of stone, each side about the length of his arm from his shoulder to his fingertips. It wasn’t tall. It wouldn’t quite come up to his rib cage. The top was slanted, so that if you stood before the stone at the edge of the sand on the other side, you would have been able to have a good look at that slanted top, but Richard couldn’t see it from where he was.
The stone looked smooth, but not smooth in the same way the sculpted rock all around them was smooth. This thing was absolutely square and straight on all sides. And while it was smooth, it was not polished like so much of the stone in palaces.
With everything some shade of red it was hard to tell what color it might actually be, but Richard thought it would be dull gray in his own world. There were markings all over the stone. He was too far away to know what kinds of markings they were, but he could see that they covered the entire stone.
Richard wondered if he should draw his sword and destroy the device before the goddess could send more Glee to his world.
As if reading his thoughts, Sang was gesturing urgently. “Hurry. We must get away from this place for now and get to those who side with me, against the goddess. I told them about you and said that I was going to see if I could get you to come back with me. They will be waiting.”
Richard and Vika followed Sang as he rushed off between the labyrinth of smooth, flowing shapes of the towering rocks surrounding the white sand. Once they were through the meandering gaps in the rock walls, the descent rapidly became steep. There was a path of sorts between the standing forest of rocks, at times with crude steps cut into the soft rock.
Below them, Richard could see a thick blanket of clouds covering the ground far into the distance.
As they moved down from the place with the device that sat at the edge of the area of sand, they gradually descended into that dark reddish cloud. As the visibility grew less and less, it was similar to moving down into clouds below high places in the mountains in Richard’s world, and having those clouds turn to a dense fog once you were inside them. It was the same here, except the fog was a dirty reddish color.
The farther down they went, the wetter the air became with mist. At some point, the mist turned to drizzle. Even before the drizzle, the heat and humidity had Richard’s shirt soaking wet.
Vika unbuckled some leather straps so that she could open her outfit at the neck. This was definitely not a place to be wearing leather, although the red fit right in. In fact, the red leather stood out brightly in the murky red world.
Sang looked relieved when they finally got into the heavier drizzle. He used his wrists to rub the water collecting on his arms around on his body, seeming to luxuriate in the wetness that he had missed for so long. He looked back at them and drew his lips back to show his teeth.
Vika glanced at Richard, wondering what it could mean.
“I think he is showing us a smile,” he whispered to her.
She gave him a look of silent incredulity.
If it really was a smile, it was about as grotesque a smile as he had ever seen.
After about a couple hours of moving quickly down slopes of loose scree that slid out from underfoot, over ledges and down through canyons of towering rock walls, and then over yet more rock, but this time harder and more jagged, they emerged from the bottom of the cloud cover into a strange, wet-looking world. The ground for as far as Richard could see was relatively flat. The only mountainous area was behind them, as was the one they had just climbed down from out of the clouds. Haze and drizzle made the visibility toward the horizon poor, but he didn’t see any hills or mountains off that way.
There was scattered, low vegetation among open swampy areas, and there were a lot of rather tall plants that resembled lush ferns. Mostly roundish rocks, most small, covered much of the ground where there wasn’t the water or areas of the low vegetation. Among those small rocks were a few smooth, round rocks no bigger than about the right size to sit on. The rocks covered most of the dry areas above the water. In fact, they littered the ground endlessly. Some of the expanses of water in the distance looked larger, but most of the water nearby was in patchy areas much like the swamps he had seen before, but without the trees.
In the distance were peculiar trees with long, crooked, bare trunks. High up each tree had a single, dense clump of leaves. Widely spaced here and there, the trees seemed to march across the landscape beneath the cloudy red sky. They were the strangest-looking trees Richard had ever seen. None, though, were very close.
Flocks of birds moved through the air like current in a raging river. As some swept down closer, he could see that they weren’t actually birds. They were large bats flying in colonies.
As they reached the bottom of the climb, Sang walked right into the first body of water he could get to until it was up to his neck. Richard could see several snakes writhing just below the surface of the water. Sang stretched out and swam for a bit, as if to refresh himself.
“Sang! There are snakes in the water!” Vika called out in alarm.
Sang kept swimming for a moment before turning back to them. “Don’t worry. The snakes are friendly.”
“Friendly? What if they bite you?” she asked.
“They eat small insects. They don’t bite us and they do not have venom, like the snakes in your world. The only animals that sometimes cause harm to us are the boars. They are big and mean, and sometimes even kill Glee.”
“Boars?” Richard asked. “You mean you have wild boars?”
“They live in the muddy places.” Sang gestured off beyond the immediate swampy water. “But sometimes they attack us. They are dangerous. They are big with tough hides our claws can’t cut through and have sharp tusks, bigger than our claws. We must always watch for wild boars when we are not in the water. They like the mud, but they don’t go near the water.”
He then busied himself at the edge of the water, dredging up water plants with round nodules dotting their entire length. They were a sickly green color, with a slight iridescence to them. When he had an armful, he flopped them over on the rocks.
“Float weed,” he told them.
As soon as he was free of his load of float weed, he started using his claws to pry at a large, flat snail stuck tight to a rock at the waterline.
“This is a muscle snail,” he announced as he worked at prying it away from the rock. “I want you to be able to try our delicious food.”
Richard thought the place smelled rather rank, like most any swamp he had been in; not as bad as some, worse than others. Vika looked around at the strange and forbidding reddish desolation, then looked over at him and spoke in a low voice that Sang wouldn’t hear.
“He’s right. This place is an absolute paradise.”
Richard half huffed a laugh in answer.
“Sang,” he said, “we’re not hungry right now. More importantly, we don’t have time for this. We need to stop the goddess before she sends her hordes to my world to kill people. You said that there were those of your kind who wanted to see me if I returned with you.”
Sang blinked up at him, then walked up onto the rocks. The water sluiced off him as he emerged from the swampy water, some of the string algae draped over a shoulder.
“Yes, you are right. My apologies. I was just so happy to be home that I wasn’t thinking. I was eager to show you some of the wonderful thin
gs about my world, so that you would not be so afraid that you must remain here.”
“Where are the others?” Richard asked, getting right down to business as he scanned the other swampy areas. They were dark, and it would be hard to see any Glee if they were in the water. “We need to talk to those who believe as you.”
Sang stretched up on his webbed toes and peered into the distance. He pointed with a claw.
“There are some of them over there, on those rocks, harvesting muscle snails. I will go talk to them and ask them to gather the others right away.”
“Good,” Richard said, as he took Vika’s arm and guided her up onto some of the rocks that were a bit flatter and easier to stand on without their ankles twisting.
In the distance, he could just make out the dark shapes of other Glee near the edge of some of the swampy areas. They were hauling up float weed. In other places he saw a few Glee swimming through larger bodies of water. They were so graceful in the water that they hardly disturbed the surface.
Richard was beginning to feel frustrated and annoyed. He had come to stop the Golden Goddess from sending the Glee to slaughter the people in his world. He and Vika had given up their futures—their lives—in order to accomplish that vital mission.
He hadn’t known that he was going to end up playing mother hen trying to gather up groups of distracted Glee.
54
Sang met with Glee that were close by. They kept staring over at Richard and Vika. He then went off to talk to others. A crowd of Glee began to come over, gathering around Richard and Vika. The way they blinked as they leaned toward him and stared, they were making him feel like some kind of curious specimen.
By the time Sang returned with yet more of the Glee, a crowd of large black heads had spread out before him. They watched him, looking like maybe they expected he might fly, or breathe out flames or something. As they all crowded in around him, they made a kind of low hiss as they looked around at each other, as if mumbling, but he didn’t hear any words in his head. Richard thought they must be talking to each other and they chose not to let the words come into his mind.
Into Darkness Page 26
